Sunday, May 6, 2012

Just spent another week cruising around the surrealistic, beautiful countryside of North Central, and Southwest Pennsylvania. For anyone unfamiliar with fracking, Rural PA is being slowly converted into part industrial zone, part Blade Runner landscape. Gas flares, drilling rigs, tens of thousands of trucks carrying chemicals,

miles of pipeline, looking from the air like thousands of tunneling moles, cutting across forests and farms. Dead animals, sick people, bad water, bad air, lawsuits, anger and exasperation are only the beginning.
Pennsylvania is so beautiful, sometimes it defies explanation. What a tragic loss. Coming soon to New York?.....TBA
I won't try and be more pedantic here. Please just take a look at the photographs, judge for yourself.

***Sorry, I thought the pictures had captions, but not to be. So I will give some important ones:
*Like, Terry Greenwood from Washington County, with his dead calf, he lost 10 stillborn calves in a row because his cows had been drinking from his pond that the gas company was dumping waste into. He kept one of them frozen in his freezer as proof.
*The Horn Family, second to last, living in the carter trailer on Carter rd in Dimock, the are suing Cabot for poisoning the water, the younger boy breaks out in rashes if he comes in contact with the water. They live on bottled water.
*Maryellen McConnell lives with a gas mask in her house in Bedford County PA. Her farm is in an area where they are pumping and storing waste underground. Several times a week gas invades her house, she has passed out and gone to the hospital several times.
*Sharon Vargson in Bradford County can light her kitchen sink on fire, the gas company well is 50 feet behind her house, the water is filled with methane gas.
*Craig Sautner in Dimock (the blue flame) fills an empty gallon jug from his well with only methane gas and can light it on fire.
*Ray Kemble in Dimock holds a jug of brown water from his well in his front yard, he is involved in delivering water to his neighbors that can't drink or wash in their water.
*And last picture, Scott Ely and his children in Dimock who had recently built his dream house when the water went bad.

Followers

Photojournalist and damn proud of it.

A very good friend wrote this about me!
Les Stone’s work straddles the worlds of photojournalism and fine art photography. His images are powerful not only because they bring to our attention important and often overlooked people and events but because they do so in a visually arresting way. Many of his photographs seem so improbable that they could be mistaken for either set-ups or manipulated images. The Iraq helicopter food drop photograph doesn’t seem as though it can possibly be real—the scale of the military helicopter, the painterly mountains in the background, the expressions on the people’s faces. In Stone’s photograph of a Voodoo ritual in Haiti two figures partially immersed in a mud pool and completely covered in the deep brown mud appear to be figures cast in bronze, a statue resembling the Pietà.